PowerShell overview

PowerShell is a cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux) scripting and automation language built on .NET. Unlike traditional shells that deal in text streams, PowerShell pipelines pass structured .NET objects, enabling rich filtering and manipulation without text parsing. PowerShell is the primary automation language for Windows Server administration, Active Directory management, Azure cloud operations (Az module), and Microsoft 365 management. DSC (Desired State Configuration) extends it to infrastructure-as-code. PowerShell 7+ (pwsh) is the modern cross-platform version; Windows PowerShell 5.1 remains prevalent in enterprise environments. Pester is the standard testing framework.